“I am not a bad woman, Father Martin, not evil at heart. But——”
She caught her breath, and pressed her hands to her breasts.
“Yes, I will go.”
She turned suddenly and walked straight out of the cell into the glare of the sunlight. And Martin Valliant stood biting the sleeve of his frock, and thinking of the look her brown eyes had given him.
Chapter VII
Kate Succory went no farther than the nearest cluster of gorse on the slope of the moor. She threw herself face downwards on a patch of short, sweet turf, where rabbits had been feeding, and plucked at the grass with her fingers, twisting her body to and fro with the lithe and supple movements of a restless animal. Her hair came loose, and she shook it down upon her shoulders.
There was rebellion in her eyes.
“He is a good man. Why should he not have what other men crave for? And I love him. There is not a man so tall and fine in all the Forest.”
She rested her elbows on the ground and her chin in her two hands, and stared at the gorse bushes.
“Geraint would not have hesitated. Pah! that black rat! How the girls would laugh at me! I don’t care. Why did God make him a priest?”